Of Pushkar and towns

These are pictures of the Pushkar fair that happens in Rajasthan every year. You can find more pictures on my facebook album. In the month of travels, the next destination was Pushkar. This was almost a photography trip, eight people armed with seven SLR cameras only to reach and find another thousand odd camera loaded curious tourists around. However, this is not only about Pushkar. The inklings of the experiences I am about to narrate started in Gokarna and Hampi, a couple of months ago. Little kids running about offering to pose for photographs, women swaying their colorful skirts nod, heads slanted, perfect play of light and shadow, camels decorated so elaborate and their owners curling their mustaches. You almost want to rush and talk to them, how is it to live in a desert? How do you cook and what do you eat? Sigh, if you could only speak their tongue. Or, maybe not, what would you like Sir, Madam? Deutsche ou Francais? Hablo espanol, even better I am fluent with Hebrew, will that do? Tired of our local food, would you like some falafel or Malawach or Fatut? How about some peach flavored iced tea under the mud thatched roof?
To the unsuspecting Indian tourist, this might just look like a film set. Backdrop of giant wheels, bubbles in the air, turkish pants in the shops and one exotic photo for only five rupees pliss pliss
This is not to scowl or mock the exotic tourist extravaganza on which these places survive. Rather it is for those who like me realize late how the rural to semi rural spaces that used to define the essence of India are holding on to those huge colorful placards of charming Indian-ness while adapting to urban consumption underneath. The language of consumption is so skewed and firmly performed, managing to serve daal baati churma and Scotch in the same wink clearly shows things have changed so much.
Again, this is not to make a point or argue for some colonial dips that keep circus artists and camel riders in Pushkar and such towns alive. It's queer, almost unsettling, how the longing, aloof sand dunes that I was so eager to sleep on are a mere construct, towns of cardboard and nicely placed dolls. I move along, munching on Bruschetta, sipping on lemon tea, my embroidered jhola drags along.

The Taj hugging story

For those who wonder where I have been, I was off to Agra to meet the dead queen :P
Quite literally this month has been the most apt definition of adventure, not necessarily pleasant though. With a weekly record of losing almost everything valuable, including a phone (and hence no communication for days now on) I have done it all. This trip was with the Mumbai friend who had also (like many of us) not seen the Taj Mahal! Back when I was a little girl, my mother showed me pictures of her first trip after marriage ( I won't say the word!) and there she was, standing as tall as the Taj Mahal and touching its tip with her fingers! The photo caught my fascination and ever since I had been wanting to make "the" trip to Taj Mahal. We also visited the ruins of Fatehpur Sikri. A small advertorial note: choose youth hostel if you know not where to stay!
But, all the minute travelogue details apart, I have been asking myself, why write a travel entry? You would surely find a million others on famous places as such and once they are old, the information obsolete. Also, I have realized that increasingly, my travels are not about the place, they are about places within. Astonishingly how, while reprimanding a wicked bus conductor or bargaining with a guide, frowning at the fellow tourist or laughing as you eat aloo tikki in Taj ganj, every street, every wall, each man's two eyes and every woman's pocket holds just one little thing out to you: mirrors. They keep reflecting facets of you that come out, or are born in not-so-ordinary circumstances.
Coming back to this trip, as we walked patiently entering gate by gate to see the white marble monument of love and grandeur, people's voices kept ringing in my ears. Many told me how I'd be disappointed,how places don't live up to their hype. For me, it wasn't true. It was so gorgeous that we circled it for almost two hours before we even touched a brick of the main building. Almost postcard-ish in memory.
Such was the romance of the dead silent place it continues to ooze in bits and pieces, I can hardly visualize it entirety. While leaving, as I hugged it, I donated two beats of my throbbing life to the slumbering queen inside.

Monolith of an impasse, this.

Like the owl of the camel barn, two big glassy eyes can convey the meditated ranges of boredom and silence can be the final axe.
I wept and I wept and I wept endlessly. Hiccuping I wept. Life’s choicest memorabilia was nothing but bulbs of cold pus, dotted in bitter memories. I do this often, feel lacerated, dismembered into smaller people, almost like elves jumping right out of the rib cage, one of which cannot stop weeping at what has been done and lost. I felt so little and there was nothing to do really. Just keep emptying pints of bitterness, hurling pots to flood the floor. It hardly feels any better.
It’s not only bitter, it’s burdensome. To write is burdensome, and to keep feeling that there are two worlds, one that you can and the other you cannot describe in any code, image, syllable, and that you've scrambled to the highest corner of the former while your round head hits an impasse at the corner of the glass ceiling where three dimensions of mundane livelihood meet, now that is an impasse.
Also how the only thing in life worth learning, mastering, reveling and melting in easily is observation. Of me who thought words were my weapon, think again is necessary when you meet an army of other word-blasting debacles, slicing like carrots and flying like tiny plastic discs.
Someone must find what the lotus inspired, quick.

Divided we live, united we bicker

Once upon a time in the whirlwind of love, cemented in the heart of the very evil frowning society, then a few years into blue tint photos by the sea, a couple of months with the newly born daughter and a few arid years past, someone took the trouble to drag it in our bitter chance dialogs over fried eggs and orange juice. You spelled it, I signed, we sealed the pending hunch, it wasn't meant to be. For the daughter who now knows, who can spell it as well as us, it is called s-e-p-a-r-a-t-i-o-n. Divorces have an epistemology. Let me locate it for you.
They exist in films, imagination, they form a characteristic salient feature of the bad houses with dim lights that balance the diabetic good of our neighborhood, they are placed in drunken adulthood, abusive childhood, impulsive youth and a couple of 'changed-man/woman' experiences later, they finish with a big dramatic bang. Do you see? They define bad houses, bad parents, bad kids, bad homework, fear of intimacy, stigma, burden, baggage and a debris of flooding photos and clothes out of the attic. Do you see, you two? You brought them conclusively to the finer side of delightful household disagreements. You pin pointed the finely carved hollows of all our tree-houses. Such confusion, such dreadful thoughts come to me, if mine will end up like you. After all, I was one of the kids in the blue sea photos.
Why mustn't you be quiet and live like others do, half your life is already gone, the half promises to be a cycle of retrospective mourning followed by epiphanies of the metamorphosed life, discourses on change, on making colder harder selves, and a few vengeful afternoons later, the wrinkles will wash all this confidence away. For lovers to commit and publicize, for married and betrothed people to eulogize, for panegyric romeo tales, and for us unwilling to enter into the holy familial bonds, you must stay. Fight within the room and sleep over it, be doomed over that one hasty wink and stolen kisses. Make believe.

Sariska and the travel birthday:Fish, tigers and age

I sat again, fretting at the edge of the epic twentieth birthday, it will JUST be another birthday of 178 facebook wishes and 20 twitter mentions, 10 calls and millions of handshakes and hugs. It is me, my birthday! How could it possibly not be big, fun etc? And, enter Chandan Gomes and his prized silver Santro car. *drum rolls*
Sariska, the tiger reserve in Rajasthan happened, a drive, yes. Exhausting, yes. But, exciting-typical-Noopur birthday? Yes!
The night started with baked cheese cake and other chocolate cake and ended in... McDonalds! I realize over years, McDonalds has stood for me, many things. It stands for the face of consumerism, the shiny place of eternal advertisement poster happiness that I never participated in my childhood in. It stands for all the Barbies I never had, all the remote cars I watched from afar and all the Super Marios I played only at a chance relative house visit. My romanticizing of McDonalds must irk you, make you laugh too maybe.
The morning too began with the same. We did not spot tigers, I doubt there are any, but we pretended to be very interested in clicking pictures of Peacocks and monkeys, all other tourist followed us, making the most of their trip :) Come le dejeuener, hunger growled like a tiger from the depths of our stomachs and we landed at this haven of food, not only food for body,but food for thought! The picture do the job, though I'd allow myself some space to describe "The Quest" cafe in the middle of Sariska town/village, its walls etched in "Free Tibet" slogans and wind chimes, surreal!
The walls dripped of poems, painted with fish, wouldn't you think this is some dreamy destiny moment, for me to encounter wall full of fish and sweet word nothings and Buddha mentions on the wall! This is what birthdays should be, a moment of crazy crazy delight. I couldn't get over it the entire day, of course. Hence, the fish eye pictures too! :)
Thanks much to all the cats, fishes, Pablo Nerudas, friends, frenemies and unknowing, unsuspecting display picture admirers, birthdays like these ease the anxiety of turning 20 (or 47, as many would agree). To celebrate the larger travel of life, by the metaphor of the car travel, it was a literary moment of joy!

Picture, lens curtsey: Chandan Gomes